81–90 of 377 posts
Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
The devs probably looked at what happened to the music dept at Id as a cautionary tale.
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Unions should focus on worker power, but staying away form politics entirely is called "economism" and "opportunism". Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production…
> Your bosses are political, they shape politics to mold the environment around you. Unions form the bedrock of worker power, and workers should advocate for a more democratic society against the oligarchs. We are some of the best positioned in society to do so because we control the means of production. I should clarify: I totally agree with being "political" in that area. The stuff I'm thinking about are things lik…
U.S. and western unions generally have been very conservative and "business unions" since the anti-communist counterattacks after WW2. This is because there has been a constant counterinsurgency tactic against our leadership involving cooptation, sidelining, and even assassination. The wealthy want to rule unopposed and for you to just vote for one of their pre-selected candidates in elections.
Since you mentioned Gaza, an issue dear to my heart (not that BLM isn't, but for brevity I'll talk about the movement that is highlighted right now), let me give an example that illustrates how essential unions are. Tech companies like Google and Microsoft are supplying information technology and AI systems to the occupation and are making bank doing it. Who is going to stop them? The people best positioned to do so are their workers.
The most essential way to help Gaza is to enforce sanctions, halting economic activity with Israeli companies, and most importantly stopping the transfer of all military materials to Israel, even so called "defensive" weapons like Iron Dome that allow the occupation to perform the genocide without repercussions. In Italy, huge strikes and protests forced the openly fascist PM that praised Mussolini to send a warship to aid the Global Samud Flotilla which aimed to break the siege on Gaza. Dock workers in Italy refused to service ships bound for Israel with weapons, and got the (again openly fascist) PM to enforce a weapons embargo.
https://www.thenation.com/article/world/italy-general-strike...
Assert your right to rule this global society in the interests of humanity in concert with your brothers and sister workers around the world.
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With a factory, the owner has to deal with the cost of all the late or canceled deliveries. With farms, the crops wither on the vines. There's not really an equivalent with most service industries. Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running.
"Software engineers don't even need to be around for the programs to keep running." Can you tell me where you work, and are you hiring???
If the factory workers don't show up for work, your factory's output immediately drops to 0%. If none of your software engineers show up, most of your company's code will continue to run, some of it in a degraded state, for a while. (How much depends on your sub-industry, and how much you're outsourcing to AWS). And if you can get 5% of your workers to show up, you might be able to handle 90% of the on-call load.
Good for them. During economic downturns, when fewer resources are available for redistribution, collective action across population groups can help address worsening power imbalances.
To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
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Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
Also, this will result in more jobs being offshored. Hollywood unions were a sticking point. In 2022 and 2023, following the lead of Netflix and Amazon, most of those jobs moved from the US to Europe and Asia. Atlanta, which was booming for nearly two decades, which had built dozens of $500M class-A film production studios, is suddenly almost entirely vacant. We went from doing almost all of Marvel and Netflix to bei…
The bank simply can't lay off people at all without drawing up the plan together with the unions.
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Perhaps. But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business. You would have to be an enormous asshole to say "it'll result in a better equilibrium" to someone who just lost his job.
> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune. Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line whe…
I also would like to see better 'tech' for tech unions to organize, vote on priorities, share grievances, elect representatives, etc.. Ideally moving to a fixed fee vs a % of compensation. It shouldn't require millions of dollars in overhead to organize.
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While things can be bad in software in general, game developers need a union more than anyone. Conditions in that industry are horrendous. The entire period of a game's development is "crunch time". Everyone is exempt, so no overtime of course. And it is standard practice to downsize studios and have mass layoffs right after big launches. It's a shame that so many are drawn to this just because of a passion for gamin…
> Everyone is exempt, This comes with a catch in California. In order to make software developers exempt there is a minimum salary you must pay otherwise you are required to keep them hourly and pay overtime where appropriate. https://www.dir.ca.gov/oprl/ComputerSoftware.htm
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To an extent. There is always the chance that the collective action discounts the impact to the business too heavily and ends up driving the company under, making the outcomes worse for everyone. We saw this a couple years ago with Yellow Trucking.
Yellow was in massive debt due to poor management decisions and the union fought against a move that would have combined driver seniority lists from various companies they managed, which they suspected was going to be used to cut people's jobs . The union did what it thought was best for all its members, and the company was in so much debt it couldn't figure out how to fulfill those needs another way. This is not a "…
Unions are subject to the constraints of operations. LTL is a very debt-heavy industry, and yellow pushed the envelop too far. But the union could have tried to negotiate a contract contingent on operating costs and debt load. They didn't. Instead they chose their line and then striked until the company went under.
Maybe not the best example, but it was the one on my mind.
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> But that's cold comfort to someone who doesn't have a job because the company went out of business I suppose only those who lose their jobs because of a merger, or the CEO making poor decisions ought to get the warm and fuzzies because someone on the Internet won't blame them for their own misfortune. Somewhere on the spectrum between "egalitarian, flat organization Utopia" and "Slavery", one has to draw a line whe…
You forgot that collective ruin is also an option and we have seen this many times when societies attempted to do away with economic & market concepts.